Having installed a Randomiser in the TARDIS to avoid the attentions of
the Black Guardian, the Doctor and the newly-regenerated Romana find
themselves on a bleak planet the Doctor is sure he has visited before.
The two are separated in a cave-in, and Romana finds herself a captive
of the Doctor's oldest foes, the Daleks. The Doctor encounters the
Daleks' enemies, the ruthless android Movellans, who reveal that the
planet is in fact Skaro. The Daleks are searching for their long-lost
creator, Davros, in an attempt to shatter the stalemate in the
Dalek-Movellan war.

Production

When Graham Williams became Doctor Who's producer towards the end
of 1976, he quickly decided not to use the Daleks right away. The
popular monsters had last been featured in 1975's Genesis Of The Daleks -- their fourth
appearance in four years -- and Williams felt that the Daleks were less
effective when they were overexposed. It was not until late 1978, when
Williams and script editor Douglas Adams were planning Doctor
Who's seventeenth season, that the producer decided the Daleks had
been rested long enough. He approached their creator, Terry Nation,
about having the Daleks appear in the Season Seventeen premiere.

Nation had last written for Doctor Who during its thirteenth
season, when he contributed the Dalek-less adventure The Android Invasion. Since then, he had been
heavily involved in the BBC science-fiction drama Blake's 7 --
even suggesting at one point that he would bring the Daleks into that
show. In November, Nation indicated that he was agreeable to the Daleks
featuring in a new Doctor Who serial, as long as he was the
writer. However, his commitments to Blake's 7 meant that he would
not be able to provide Williams and Adams with scripts quickly enough
for the new Dalek story to be made at the start of Doctor Who's
seventeenth recording block. Not wanting to lose such a strong hook to
the season, Williams elected to push the Dalek tale back to third in the
production roster (making it Serial 5J), although it would remain the
first adventure broadcast.

Terry Nation was adamant that K-9 play only a small role,
because he did not want the robot dog to upstage the Daleks

Destiny Of The Daleks was commissioned on December 20th. Williams
and Adams suggested that Nation draw upon a short story (apparently
written by Isaac Asimov) about two armies, each reliant upon a battle
computer which is logically unable to outwit its counterpart. Nation,
for his part, wanted to bring back the character of Davros, creator of
the Daleks, whom he had introduced in Genesis Of
The Daleks. Nation had been careful to depict Davros as being
defeated but not destroyed in that story -- correcting a mistake he had
made with regards to the Daleks in their debut appearance, The Daleks. Nation was also adamant that K-9
play only a small role in his scripts, because he did not want the robot
dog to upstage his own inventions.

Destiny Of The Daleks underwent only minor changes during its
development. K-9 was originally trapped in the TARDIS due to a rockfall,
while the Daleks searched for Davros because he can supply information
about special circuitry which will help them break the deadlock. The
Movellans were called Petrans, while Tyssan's name was initially Valtan.
Nation had also set much of the action at night, but the Doctor
Who budget would not permit this kind of location filming, and so it
had to be rewritten for the day.

Adams also made several contributions to the script. In particular, it
fell to him to write the opening sequence involving Romana's
regeneration. The original Romana, Mary Tamm, was now several months
pregnant and so could not be asked back to appear in the scene. Adams
decided that he would instead write the regeneration as a parody of the
Doctor's costume changes in Tom Baker's debut serial, Robot, with Romana “trying on”
different bodies instead of different outfits. Adams also added the
scene in which the Doctor humorously taunts the Daleks about their
inability to follow him up a vertical shaft. Nation disliked this, as he
believed that pointing out the Daleks' apparent design flaws made them
less menacing, and threatened their popularity with the viewing
public.

Serial 5J was assigned to Ken Grieve, directing his only Doctor
Who story. Grieve's prior credits included Coronation Street;
he went on to helm episodes of programmes such as Poirot,
Bugs and The Bill, and passed away on November 15th,
2016. Unfortunately, Grieve discovered that he was sorely limited in
terms of the Dalek casings available to him. Although seven were
retained by the BBC, four of these were inferior versions made for
1973's Planet Of The Daleks, of which two
were deemed completely unusable and a third required a new skirt
section. The other three props were holdovers from the Sixties. One of
these was cannibalised to serve as a mould for several cheap, immobile
versions which could be used for long shots and scenes in which a Dalek
needed to be destroyed on-screen. This left just four working casings,
and the budget did not permit the construction of any more.

Michael Wisher, who had originally played Davros, was
performing in Australia and was therefore unavailable

Grieve also had to deal with the fact that Michael Wisher, who had
played Davros in Genesis Of The Daleks, was
performing in Australia and was therefore unavailable for Serial 5J. In
Wisher's place he cast David Gooderson, but because the Davros mask had
been designed specifically for Wisher, it did not fit Gooderson
particularly well. The mask, costume and skirt section were also in a
dilapidated state, having been on display at various Doctor Who
exhibitions since 1975, but again the budget allowed for only minimal
repairs.

Two quarries were utilised to represent the surface of Skaro. The first
of these was Winspit Quarry in Worth Matravers, Dorset, where work began
on June 11th, 1979. The next two days were spent at Binnegar Heath Sand
Pit at Wareham, Dorset, before cast and crew returned to Winspit Quarry
on the 14th and 15th. For the first time, a Steadycam (or Steadicam) was
used during the location shoot. This was still a relatively new
invention, having been introduced to the film industry in 1976, and only
a handful were yet available in Britain; its use in a television
production was virtually unheard of.

On June 20th, various effects inserts were filmed at the BBC Visual
Effects Department. Studio recording then began with a two-day block on
July 2nd and 3rd, at BBC Television Centre Studio 3. July 2nd dealt with
scenes in the ruined building where the Doctor is trapped beneath a
pillar, the underground chamber and various corridors. The next day
centred on the small room where the Doctor holds Davros captive
and the adjacent underground space.

The second studio session lasted three days, from July 15th to 17th,
with recording taking place in TC1. The first day dealt with scenes in
the TARDIS -- with Roy Skelton, who was voicing the Daleks, providing
K-9's laryngitis-induced coughing -- as well as those in the underground
area where the dormant Davros was found. The next two days were each
dedicated to a single set: the Dalek control centre on the 16th and the
Movellan spacecraft on the 17th.

Production was not without incident. On July 3rd, the Daleks'
destruction of the Doctor's barrier had to be refilmed when the smoke
from the explosion was sucked into the fan built into Davros' chair. A
visiting Doctor Who aficionado named Kevin Davies was accused of
changing the setting on the fan; many years later, Davies would direct
various Doctor Who documentaries beginning with 1993's Doctor
Who: Thirty Years In The TARDIS as well as the spin-off video
Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarans. The Davros mask was in such
disrepair that after one of the studio days, it was discarded by a
cleaner who mistook it for garbage. Fortunately, it was recovered in
time to be used again.

The Davros mask was in such disrepair that it was
discarded by a cleaner who mistook it for garbage

On September 1st, Destiny Of The Daleks part one inaugurated
Doctor Who's seventeenth season. At the time, ITV -- BBC1's
primary competitor -- was embroiled in a labour strike and had gone off
the air. As a result, Destiny Of The Daleks enjoyed some of
Doctor Who's largest ratings ever, averaging 13.5 million viewers
and reaching an all-time high of 14.4 million for the final installment.
This record would quickly be quashed with the very next serial, City Of Death.

Destiny Of The Daleks turned out to be Terry Nation's final
Doctor Who serial. Nation moved to California in 1980 and chiefly
worked on projects for American television thereafter, most notably the
long-running adventure series MacGyver. In the early Nineties,
Nation and former Doctor Who story editor Gerry Davis put
together an unsuccessful proposal to resurrect Doctor Who
following its cancellation in 1989. Nation also mooted the possibility
of relaunching Blake's 7. However, Nation's health waned
throughout the Nineties, and the man who created the Daleks died of
emphysema on March 9th, 1997.